Youth leaders want their teenagers to develop a healthy, missional worldview; and they want to provide experiences that foster that concept in teens’ hearts and minds. Often this seems like it is easier said than done, so YouthWorker Journal talked to Dino Rizzo, Dave Workman and Reggie Joiner, three leaders who are speaking powerfully into the ongoing conversation happening in youth ministry regarding the question of how to help students develop a missional worldview.

Author of Servolution (Zondervan, 2009) and the founding pastor of the innovative Healing Place Church in Baton Rouge, La., Dino Rizzo speaks passionately about the revolutionary power of serving others.

Dave Workman is the senior pastor of Vineyard Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, and author of The Outward-Focused Life: Becoming a Servant in a Serve-Me World (Baker Books, 2008). Dave’s pioneering voice has provided an ongoing call for Christians to develop an outward-focused, servant-oriented life.

Reggie Joiner’s new book, Think Orange: Imagine the Impact When Church and Family Collide (David C. Cook, 2009) is a call for change and a new philosophy of family ministry. Founder and CEO of the reThink group, Reggie’s imaginative voice calls churches to Think Orange and unite church and family for maximum impact.

YouthWorker Journal: Many people talk about having a missional mindset, but they’re not sure what that means. How do you define missional?

Reggie Joiner: Without being too sarcastic, would it be OK to define missional the way Jesus did? “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…” It simply involves helping people who are not following Jesus to follow Jesus.

Dave Workman: To me, in its purest form missional is simply an adjective to describe being sent with the message and works of the Kingdom. In many ways, a missionary incarnates Jesus to those who don’t know Him.

Dino Rizz For us, being missional means we just believe we are on a mission to be a healing place for a hurting world. It’s like Jake and Elwood [Blues Brothers, 1980]. We’re on a mission from God, and all we do stems from that.

YWJ: Some youth workers say they want their kids to be missional. Do you think these efforts are working? What’s working and what’s not?

Dave: Some of it actually may involve redefining what a disciple really is. It certainly isn’t just a repository of correct theological information or practicing sin management. We’ve defined disciple very simply: a surrendered and transformed person who loves God and others. That’s best described as moving from an inwardfocused to an outward-focused lifestyle.

Reggie: What doesn’t work is a compartmentalized approach, like a one-time mission project in the poor part of town or in another country. We need to trust students to take real leadership—in our churches, in our communities and around the world. We will give a 10th grader the keys to a two-ton piece of steel with a powerful engine and turn them loose on the expressway, but we won’t give him or her the keys to ministry. If we don’t start talking about it until the last semester of the senior year, we’ve already lost. We need to be saying, “Leverage your influence. Don’t just go to church. Be the church.”

YWJ: Can you cite examples of activities that are helping promote the missional mandate?

Reggie: One of the decisions we made at North Point from the very beginning was to deploy students in strategic service on Sunday mornings. Rather than send them to another Bible study or the kind of Sunday School we all grew up with, we challenged them to serve in all kinds of places on our church campus. They apprenticed alongside more seasoned leaders and did just about every job you can imagine. We didn’t do this because we needed more workers; we did this because we realized our greatest time of growing came when we were serving others. God doesn’t need me to serve; I need to serve because God will use that process in my life to embolden my belief and strengthen my journey with Him.

YWJ: When it comes to helping teenagers build a missional mindset, is the good old short-term mission trip a good thing?

Dino: Absolutely. The raw, hands-on, sweating-in-the-trenches that comes during many short-term missions is priceless. So much character is made in those times, and their worlds are enlarged. At the same time, I’d inject the reminder that there is a lot that can be (and should be) done in our own communities. It isn’t a question of either/or, but rather both/and. We should show them how to serve here at home in our backyards, as well as overseas.

Dave: Yes, if how it’s used is maximized. The semi-potential danger is students not recognizing their own local mission field, especially if outreach only is experienced and defined as somewhere distant. We can’t afford to have the term missional narrowly hijacked that way.

Reggie: Short-term mission trips are good things, but short-term relationships are not. If a student pastor takes a bunch of kids on a trip to another country without real, lasting relationships in mind, then that’s a form of exhibitionism. “Look at thepoor people over here. See the cardboard shacks over here.”

YWJ: How can youth workers sustain the experiences and insights kids gain during short-term mission trips so these things will change their long-term perspectives?

Dino: We have found that a great way to sustain the experience is to develop ongoing relationships with the people in places where we serve. This allows our students to have a continual reminder of their own experiences as they hear about others going to/returning from the field where they served. We try to make those places where we served overseas ongoing parts of our thoughts and speech at home. One great key to this is that short-term opportunities to serve with a group creates moments for us to get out of our regular social pattern. It is a voluntary displacement to do life with people who are different from us but matter intensely to God.

Reggie: Kids especially need to see that their investment and influence make a real difference. Does the village child they helped get into school promote to the next grade a few months after they get back? If so, the students need to know that and celebrate it. Can students go back to the same place summer after summer so that it’s not about the latest mission tour but about returning to a place and people they care about? That’s only possible if the relationships are long-term and the student pastor keeps in touch with the host ministry.

Dave: It’s critical to have times to [debrief] the experience. Never waste an experience by not celebrating, processing and creating opportunities for continued pathways to missional lifestyles.

YWJ: A missional mindset among the teenagers participating in the youth ministry isn’t going very far if the parents and the rest of the church are not making the journey also. Any advice for making this a shared learning experience for all?

Dave: Ritualize servant-evangelism in your church; never think of it as just a youth activity. It’s the easiest and simplest way to begin to create a servant culture in your DNA. An outward-focused church has an outward-focused leader. Let’s not forget the obvious: We serve people outside the church. It scares me to see how much ministry is inward-focused in our churches.

Reggie: We’ve been saying for years that a church has about 40 hours to influence a young person while parents have more than 3,000 hours. That means considering vacations, breaks and the like, a church leader will have about an hour each Sunday, 40 times a year. If we can’t equip parents to leverage the 3,000 hours they have outside the church, we’ll never have the kind of influence we need to have.

Dino: Valuing the next generation is vital. That doesn’t mean just applauding them; it means engaging them. We work hard to encourage the young to value the old and the old to value the young. All of us need all of us. The more we can value each other and what God is doing in each other’s lives, the more we’ll be able to share the victories and challenges; that means a much healthier church.

YWJ: What tools, resources or curricula would you recommend for use by groups?

Dave: The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns is good for leaders. For a page-turner that reads like a novel, read Same Kind of Different as Me by Hall and Moore for inspiration. The Outward-Focused Life: Becoming a Servant in a Serve-Me World is filled with short stories, ideas and personal experiences. It’s a quick, easy read and can be used like a devotional.

Dino: Number one is the Bible. After that, I’d say Steve Sjogren’s Conspiracy of Kindness is one of the greatest books on the subject. We tried to make Servolution another great resource for developing a culture of serving, so of course I would recommend it.

Reggie: The reThink curriculum makes students aware of three missional experiences: the wonder of an authentic relationship with God, the discovery that we belong to Jesus and should follow Him, and the passion to demonstrate God’s love to a broken world every day. The bottom line is whatever curriculum you use, you should put a creative team around it and ask, “How can we leverage this series to mobilize students to do something and become more active as a catalysts in their world?”

YWJ: What else would you like to say to youth workers about helping kids become more missional?

Dave: Just get started doing the simplest outreaches you can. Tell your own stories of success and failure in becoming more outward-focused. Go wherever you can to get inspired. Stoke your own missional mindset—it’ll leak out, guaranteed.

Dino: Provide opportunities to serve together. Communicate: Talk a lot about what you want to accomplish. Don’t try to convert everyone to your cause overnight. Allow grace for where people currently are on their own journeys. Pray for the harvest. On your knees, you see the world differently.